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UK Courts Rule Nintendo DS R4 Cards Illegal
CheShACat writes "A UK high court ruled today that R4 cards for the Nintendo DS are illegal, finding two vendors guilty of selling 'game copiers.' The ruling by Justice Floyd is quoted as saying, 'The economic effect on Nintendo of the trade in these devices is substantial as each accused device can store and play copies of many Nintendo DS games [...] The mere fact that the device can be used for a non-infringing purpose is not a defence.' No word in the article as to what law in particular they were found to have broken, nor of the penalty the vendors are facing, but this looks like bad news for all kinds of hardware mod, on any platform, that would enable homebrew users to bypass vendor locks."
Nintendo won a related lawsuit in the Netherlands recently, in addition to the one in Australia earlier this year.
My baseball bat is a murder weapon. The fact that I can use it to play baseball is not a defense.
Guns for hunting/murder.
Recording devices for reminders/spying.
Tacos for eating/poison delivery.
The mere fact that the device can be used for a non-infringing purpose is not a defence
Right in the summary. They know, they just don't care.
Canada: The US's more awesome sibling.
One big feature of jailbreaking iPhones is that you can install apps on your iPhone in a similar manner that you could install NDS games on an R4. Does this also mean that jailbreaking an iPhone is illegal there, too? It should be noted that a major feature of the R4s, and similar devices, was that you can run homebrew on your NDS, which I have. There's some decent homebrew (not that great of a selection, but still some good stuff) available, such as the (excellent) roguelike game POWDER.
It gets better.
Now that the UK has banned guns, they are starting to go after knives.
They don't seem to be content with fighting knives, they want to go after kitchen knives too.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Plaintiffs and defendants should just fax the judge their financial records for the last year.
Whoever has the most money wins the case.
That way, we could save taxpayer money and the verdicts would invariably come out the same way as they would have through trial.
Yup, I'm pretty sure we do. Regardless of one's feelings about piracy, positive or negative, it is an uncomfortable fact that any combination of law and technology sufficient to stamp out, or even seriously inconvenience, piracy will necessarily be downright authoritarian in power and scope, corrosive to privacy, and almost perfectly suited to the suppression of any other flavor of information, art, culture, speech, etc.
These are just architectural necessities of any anti-piracy system that isn't going to be a penny-ante joke. Whatever you think about piracy, they are quite arguably too high a price to pay.
Do you seriously think most people buy R4s for homebrew? That's like saying most people use torrents to get Linux ISOs.
You'd have a point if 99% of people used knives to murder and 1% used them to cook.
I had a CycloDS for my DS, but your DSi's firmware blocked it from working. This page reminded me to look, and sure enough, I can now buy a nice Acekard 2i for like $15 and/or a Supercrad DStwo for about $35 that does things your console should do natively (such as GBA and SNES emulation), both of which use the same 16 GB Micro SDHC card that my CycloDS uses, all of which will work with my nice Nintendo DSiXL.
Of course, since I own physical copies of all the games I put on my flash cart, it's all ethically sound, if not legally unassailable. Fortunately for me, I am much more concerned with living ethically, if not legally, especially when in regards to stupid, anti-consumer laws like the ones that would outlaw this sort of thing. Although Nintendo might be screwed even in that case, because "Jailbreaking" a mobile device is now legal in the US. Since my DS is a mobile device, and the Acekard / DStwo are methods of "jailbreaking," -- i.e., running unapproved software -- well, seems to me the much loved DMCA that Nintendo would no doubt use to shut these things down in the US... wouldn't actually shut them down.
So thank you, Nintendo. Thank you for reminding me to look for a DSi compatible flash cart, and reminding me I need to do my part to support small development studios like the Supercard and Acekard teams.
because you can use something else as a doorstop. Can you use anything else to run homebrew?
Anyway, Auntie says that HMRC have siezed 165,000 of these things, that's a sizeable market. Hopefully pissing off that many ordinary consumers of Nintendo products (don't forget, all those people will have bought DSs) will hopefully hit them where it hurts.
FGD 135
As I understand it, there's a movement to ban any knife with a point, to reduce stabbings. Because banning tool #1 meant that people intent on violence switched to tool #2, banning tool #2 is sure to work this time! (What's that definition of insanty again?)
It's at least hard to make a gun in your garage. But adding a point to a knife? Only the law will be pointless.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
UK High Court
The mere fact that the device can be used for a non-infringing purpose is not a defence.
US Supreme Court in Sony vs. Universal:
On the question of whether Sony could be described as "contributing" to copyright infringement, the Court stated:
[There must be] a balance between a copyright holder's legitimate demand for effective - not merely symbolic - protection of the statutory monopoly, and the rights of others freely to engage in substantially unrelated areas of commerce. Accordingly, the sale of copying equipment, like the sale of other articles of commerce, does not constitute contributory infringement if the product is widely used for legitimate, unobjectionable purposes. Indeed, it need merely be capable of substantial noninfringing uses....
It's interesting that the two courts took diametrically opposed positions on this subject. Of course, Congress pretty well neutered that decision with a succession of purchased laws culminating in the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, but that was one case where the Supremes ultimately got it right.
And then, after all the hate and discontent they raised over the advent of the VCR, the movie industry went on to rake in billions selling VHS movies on writeable media played back on the previously-vilified Video Cassette Recorder. Money they would never have seen had the hardware companies not been free to develop and market something new. That was not a surprising attitude, though: the content cartels have always been about maintaining the status quo, and can't quite seem to wrap their heads around the fact that change can make money. But that would require them to actually think, and maybe do a little innovating of their own. But history has demonstrated conclusively that they don't know how to do that.
Anyone remember Jack Valenti's impassioned monologue about how the VCR would "destroy the industry"? Yeah. He was spot on with that one, wasn't he. This is also the guy who said, "I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone." Right on, Jack. Point is, these are people who don't have anything on their minds but control, control and more control. It's not even about the money, it's about control. They've controlled matters so well, in fact, that I won't purchase a game console. I don't like who I'd have to thank for it, and I don't like their business models, and I don't like the fact that the machine isn't really mine. You want to lease the box to me, that would be different. But they don't: they want me to pay cold hard cash for the illusion of ownership (ha, kind of like buying a house, when you think about it.)
Fact is, the content industries are mostly led by short-sighted fools. At some point, their stockholders are going to have to rise up and slay them, because they're throwing money away by not going with the flow, by not learning from history and their own mistakes, by being greedy to the point of sociopathy.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Dunno why you're devil's advocating to me, since I was just pointing out that his statement was already covered, but, eh, why not give you my take (using illegal and infringing interchangeably, since I'm talking generically)...
I think a device should be judged based on a couple factors:
1. Possible uses.
2. Predominate uses.
3. Harm to people from allowing illegal uses.
4. Harm to people from removing device from circulation completely.
Yes, this actually requires people to think, and not have cut and dried answers, but I think it's a fair way to evaluate something.
If a device has 5,000 uses, good for it (1), but then everyone always just uses the two illegal uses (2), then you can judge the device as "bad," and get rid of it. If, however, it has two uses, and it's split 50/50 between illegal and legal uses, then you need to use tests 3 and 4. Say, your bomb doorstop. People would be killed if you, or someone you know, decided to set it off. That's a fairly massive amount of harm, and so your legal use doesn't outweigh the need to keep something like that safely locked away. Then you have test 4. Say a small group of people started using pacemakers to high-jack planes. Removing pacemakers from the market entirely just is not feasible. It would be incumbent upon airlines to secure planes against that interference.
Of course, these are extreme examples, and where lines are drawn will be different with different products. Thus, arguing non-infringing use as a defence would be arguing that your personal gain, and the gain of others using it in your fashion, is greater than the loss suffered by allowing the illegal use to continue. In this case, it was decided that more people are using R4 cards in an illegal/infringing manner than are using it for legitimate uses, and the removal of the legitimate uses isn't doing any material harm to homebrewers beyond not being able to do homebrew, which Nintendo doesn't allow on their consoles any way, thus placing Nintendo in the same camp as Apple with jailbreaking, et al.
Canada: The US's more awesome sibling.